Outstanding young New Zealand stallion Gold Brose has been put down.
Gold Brose, sire of the ill-fated top three-year-old Buzz Lightyear, was destroyed in Palmerston North on Thursday at Massey University where he had been receiving veterinary attention for a lung infection.
Gold Brose stood at the Waikato property of Westbury Stud in Cambridge and according to manager Russell Warwick there had been concern for the horse for about a fortnight.
"He had a high temperature a couple of weeks ago that developed into a pneumonia," Warwick said.
"After he had some secondary problems we sent him straight to Massey, where he has been for 10 days. But even though he had the best care in New Zealand we had to put him down."
Warwick said he and Gold Brose's other owners were devastated at losing the son of Huntingdale.
"It hasn't been a pleasant 10 days and his death is a huge loss for us.
"He was only 10 years old and you normally expect that you might have a stallion for a few years yet when they are that age.
"But you have to move forward. I've been in the industry for 25 years and I hope to be in it for 25 more.
"It's not the first time we have lost a horse and it's not going to be the last."
Gold Brose, a top class sprinter at the age of two and three in Australia, pushed Warwick and the then Westbury Farm of Cambridge into the top echelon of studs.
Few breeders believed he would make a good stallion when he arrived in 1995.
His sire was Huntingdale, who was a major flop at stud, and Gold Brose barely served a mare from outside Westbury or its close client base in his first few seasons.
Warwick and the owners' syndicate knew they would have to make the stallion on their own and set about buying a number of highly commercial mares which they thought suited Gold Brose genetically.
It succeeded in stunning fashion.
His first crop of 41 included five stakes winners, four of them multiple stakes winners.
The best was Buzz Lightyear, winner of the group one races, the Two Thousand Guineas and the Bayer Classic last season. Buzz Lightyear died in Melbourne last February.
Gold Brose's first crop also included Catamarca, who the Australian ratings agency Fast Form named champion juvenile filly of Australasia in 1998-99 after she won the Matamata Breeders' Stakes. She came back at three to win the group three Lion Brown Plate at Rotorua.
Other first crop stakes winners were Joan's Best, who won three listed stakes races in the South Island last season, and the Queensland group two winning filly Cryptavia.
The lift that Gold Brose gave Warwick helped bring him to the attention of top owner Eric Watson. The two are re-developing Westbury Stud with a new complex under construction at Karaka south of Auckland.
"Gold Brose has done a fantastic amount for me," Warwick said.
"We are going to bring his body back and bury him at the new farm."
Gold Brose's loss is making the 1995 stallion intake look like an extremely ill-fated one.
Other promising stallions from that intake to have died are Blues Traveller and Maroof.
Westbury still has four stallions on its roster. The oldest, Faltaat, has made a huge impression in his first crop through dual group one winner Tit For Taat.
- NZPA
Racing: Gold Brose put down after developing pneumonia
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